Wayne Madsen - Israel’s Secret Plan for a «Second Israel» in Ukraine - Strategic Culture Foundation

NoBC4U Note: I've seen several stories similar to this before, but passed on posting them. But this story continues to be reported, which indicates there just may be something to this story.

The Times of Israel, an independent Israeli newspaper that counts among its staff a number of former reporters for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, published a fascinating but largely overlooked story datelined Jerusalem and Zhitomir, Ukraine, March 16, 2014, and which was written by its respective Russian and Ukrainian correspondents, Hirsh Ostropoler and I. Z. Grosser-Spass, citing a secret report provided to the Israeli government. The report, written by a select panel of scholars of Jewish history drawn from academia and other research centers, concluded that that European Jews are in fact descended from Khazars, a war-like Mongol-Tatar group that ruled over Ukraine and southern Russia, which mass-converted to Judaism in the eighth century AD.

Zionists have long argued that the land claimed by Israel was the biblical birthright of the Jewish people who were forced from the land in a so-called «diaspora» after repeated conquests by various empires. Proof that Ashkenazi Jews, which make up a majority of the Israeli Jewish population, have no historical link to Palestine would call into question the entire premise of Israel as the historical «5,000-year old» homeland of the Jewish people.

The Israeli journalists noted that any conversation of the Khazars and modern Israel has always been met with disdain by Israeli leaders. They quote Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir as once saying, «Khazar, Schmazar. There is no Khazar people. I knew no Khazars. In Kiev. Or Milwaukee. Show me these Khazars of whom you speak». DNA proof that a migratory Khazar population from Europe is now claiming ancient roots in Palestine largely eliminates Zionist claims to the region.

The evidence that eastern and central European Jews have no historical claim to Palestine has resulted in a flurry of activity in Israel and abroad. The Israeli Knesset will soon vote on a bill passed by the Israeli Cabinet that legalizes Israel as a Jewish «national state». Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who read the secret report on the Khazars, has declared that «Israel is the Jewish, nationalist state for the Jewish people». With the Ashkenazi claims to Israel tenuous, at best, Netanyahu, his Likud Party, and his Jewish Orthodox and West Bank settler party allies have no other choice but to aggressively stake their nationalist claims to not only Israel but also to the West Bank – which the nationalists refer to as «Judea and Samaria».

Complete story at - Wayne Madsen - Israel’s Secret Plan for a «Second Israel» in Ukraine - Strategic Culture Foundation

How the Israel Lobby Protected Ukrainian Neo-Nazis | Alternet

November 18, 2014 |

AlterNet has learned that an amendment to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have forbidden US assistance, training and weapons to neo-Nazis and other extremists in Ukraine was kept out of the final bill by the Republican-led House Rules Committee. Introduced by Democratic Representative John Conyers, the amendment was intended to help tamp down on violent confrontations between Ukrainian forces and Russian separatists. (Full text of the amendment embedded at the end of this article).

A USA Today/Pew poll conducted in April while the NDAA was being debated found that Americans opposed by more than 2 to 1 providing the Ukrainian government with arms or other forms of military assistance.

If passed, Conyers' amendment would have explicitly barred those found to have offered “praise or glorification of Nazism or its collaborators, including through the use of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, or other similar symbols” from receiving any form of support from the US Department of Defense.

The amendment was presented by congressional staffers to lobbyists from Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, two of the country’s largest established Jewish pressure groups. Despite their stated mission to combat anti-Semitism and violent extremism, the ADL and Wiesenthal Center refused to support Jeffries and Conyers’ proposal.

According to Democratic sources in Congress, staffers from the ADL’s Washington office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center rejected the amendment on the grounds that right-wing Ukrainian parties like Svoboda with documented records of racist extremism had “moderated their rhetoric.” An ADL lobbyist insisted that “the focus should be on Russia,” while the Wiesenthal Center pointed to meetings between far-right political leaders in Ukraine and the Israeli embassy as evidence that groups like Svoboda and Right Sector had shed their extremism.

The ADL’s Washington office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center did not respond to numerous requests by email and telephone for comment.

Complete story at - How the Israel Lobby Protected Ukrainian Neo-Nazis | Alternet

Turkey and Israel Are Directly Supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda Terrorists In Syria - Washington's Blog

U.S. Allies Support the Terrorists We’re Supposedly “Fighting”

The Jerusalem Post reports that an ISIS fighter says that Turkey funds the terrorist group. Turkey is a member of NATO and a close U.S. ally.

A German news program – with English subtitles captions – shows that Turkey is sending terrorists into Syria:

Opposition Turkish lawmakers say that the government is protecting and cooperating with ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists, and providing free medical care to their leaders.

According to a leading Turkish newspaper (Today’s Zaman), Turkish nurses are sick of providing free medical treatment to ISIS terrorists in Turkish hospitals.

According to Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh and leaked phone calls between top Turkish officials, Turkey also carried out the chemical weapons attack which has been blamed on Assad, and has planned other “false flag attacks” within Turkey.

Foreign Policy documents that Israel is also treating ISIS terrorists for free in its hospitals:

Complete story at - Turkey and Israel Are Directly Supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda Terrorists In Syria - Washington's Blog

Thirteen arrested as protesters tell Senators Menendez and Booker 'No More Blank Check for Israel’s Crimes'

On Tuesday August 26, 2014, more than 50 demonstrators protested outside the Newark, New Jersey, offices of U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker demanding that the legislators stop providing a blank check for Israel’s crimes. Thirteen demonstrators were arrested inside the building as they read out the names of some of the nearly 500 Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

(When B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, had tried to run a radio ad merely listing the names of five of the hundreds of children killed, the Israeli Broadcast Authority banned them from doing so.)

The U.S. Senate has played a shameful role during the recent Israeli assault on Gaza, twice voting 100-0 to give its full support to Israel, saying nothing about its violations of international humanitarian law (indeed, condemning the United Nations’ Human Rights Council for deigning to investigate war crimes), nothing about the blockade of Gaza, and nothing about the occupation, while promising Israel still more weapons.

All this, while more than 2,100 Gazans have been killed, with civilians constituting 85 percent of those whose status has been determined thus far. Families were blown to smithereens in their homes. More than 100,000 people lost their homes. UN refugee shelters were repeatedly struck. Artillery was used in densely populated areas, leveling entire neighborhoods. High-rise buildings were demolished. Water and power facilities were struck.

Complete story at - Thirteen arrested as protesters tell Senators Menendez and Booker 'No More Blank Check for Israel’s Crimes'

MSM War on Gaza

Journalists daring to criticize Israel responsibility face likely dismissal and banishment from MSM employment.

Once again, Israel waged cold, calculated premeditated aggression against near defenseless Palestinians.

An Israeli Goliath mercilessly attacked a Palestinian David. It did so for unjustifiable reasons. Mass slaughter, destruction and human misery followed.

Non-combatant men, women and children suffered most. They were deliberately targeted. They comprised over 80% of deaths and injuries.

Israeli casualties hardly compare to around 2,000 mostly civilian Palestinian deaths, up to 10,000 injured, large parts of Gaza in ruins, hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced, and families losing all their possessions.

Operation Protective Edge is the most devastating Israeli aggression on Palestinians since its 1947-48 war.

A shaky ceasefire could end any time. Heavy Israeli shelling and bombing could resume. Palestinian casualties could continue mounting.

The fate of about 1.7 million Gazans hangs in the balance. They're trapped in the world's largest open-air prison. They're unable to find refuge anywhere.

Every square inch of Gaza is fair game. Israel inflicts collective punishment mercilessly. Civilian men, women and children are considered legitimate targets.

So are schools, hospitals, mosques, residential neighborhoods and vital infrastructure unrelated to military necessity. Terror bombing and shelling reflect longstanding Israeli policy.

Precision weapons can mass slaughter with technological ease. Banned terror weapons are used against defenseless civilians in densely populated residential areas.

They include 4cm-long metal darts called flechettes. They're anti-personnel weapons able to penetrate bone deep enough to inflict horrific injuries.

One artillery shell can deliver up to 8,000 of them. On impact, rupturing releases them at high speed in a funnel-shaped pattern over an area of about 300 meters.

White phosphorous is devastating to human flesh. It's a flammable chemical. Israel uses it as an incendiary weapon and smoke screen.

When exposed to air, it spontaneously ignites. It burns to the bone. It keeps burning until consumed or deprived of oxygen.

Complete story at - MSM War on Gaza

'Let's sanction Russia!' — RT Op-Edge

Israel shells a UN school in Gaza killing 15. It's the sixth time a UN school has been struck.

'Children, women and men killed & injured as they slept in a place where they should have been safe and protected. They were not. Intolerable', says Pierre Krahenbuhl, commissioner general of UNRWA.

Overall, almost 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces with missiles and military equipment supplied by the US. After the latest UN school attack, it was announced that the US will send more ammunition to Israel. The conclusion is: “Let’s sanction Russia!”

Over 1,000 people have been killed in the east of Ukraine and nearly 3,500 wounded since the US-backed Ukrainian government's brutal military offensive started in April. Around 100,000 people have been forcibly displaced. On Sunday, at least 13 civilians were killed by Ukrainian shelling- including a one-year-old girl killed next to her parents. What do we hear? “Let’s sanction Russia!”

The US and EU supported the violent overthrow of a democratically elected President and government in Ukraine, one year before elections were due, creating the current crisis in the country. “Let’s sanction Russia!”

Ukrainian ultranationalists set fire to a trade union headquarters building in Odessa and kill around 40 people. As people tried to escape they were bludgeoned with baseball bats “Let’s sanction Russia!”

After the illegal unconstitutional coup in Kiev, which brings far-right, Russia-hating ultranationalists to power, the people of Crimea vote in a peaceful, democratic referendum to rejoin Russia. “Let’s sanction Russia!”

Complete story at - 'Let's sanction Russia!' — RT Op-Edge

Asia Times Online :: Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia)

by Pepe Escobar

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining it ...

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic - George Orwell, 1984

So Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Hollande and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi - let's call them the Fab Five - get on a video conference call to muster their courage and "increase pressure" asking for a cease-fire in Gaza. Later in the day, Israel's Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu delivers his answer, in plain language: he remains dead set on achieving his version of a Final Solution to Gaza. [1] With or without "pressure".

So what's left for the Fab Five after having their illustrious Western collective behinds solemnly kicked? They decide to dump Gaza and instead sanction Russia - again! How brilliant is that as an exit strategy?

Spectacular non-entity Tony Blinken, who doubles as deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, was keen to stress to Western corporate media that the unruly Eurotrash mob is now "determined to act". No, not against Israel because of Gaza; against Russia because of Ukraine. Such a lovely Orwellian symmetry: the extended Two Minutes Hate from Israel towards Gazans morphs into the extended Two Minutes Hate from the "West" towards Russia, mirroring the extended Two Minutes Hate from Kiev towards Eastern Ukrainians.

Not even Hollywood could come up with such a plot; Israel gets away with unlawful premeditated mass murder of civilians, while Russia gets framed for a (smaller-scale) airborne mass murder of civilians that has all the makings of being set up by the Kiev vassals of Russia's Western "partners".

Here I have exposed how sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is the one and only official Obama administration "policy" on Russia. On top of the next European Union sanctions, coming soon, the US will be piling up - what else - more sanctions. After all, Washington is so "concerned" that Moscow will sooner or later invade Ukraine; that would certainly, and finally, answer all those In God We Trust prayers.

Complete story at - Asia Times Online :: Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia)

Gaza: this shameful injustice will only end if the cost of it rises | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian

For the third time in five years, the world’s fourth largest military power has launched a full-scale armed onslaught on one of its most deprived and overcrowded territories. Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip began, just over a week ago, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed. Nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children.

Around 1,400 have been wounded and 1,255 Palestinian homes destroyed. So far, Palestinian fire has killed one Israeli on the other side of the barrier that makes blockaded Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison.

But instead of demanding a halt to Israel’s campaign of collective punishment against what is still illegally occupied territory, the western powers have blamed the victims for fighting back. If it weren’t for Hamas’s rockets fired out of Gaza’s giant holding pen, they insist, all of this bloodletting would end.

“No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” Barack Obama declared, echoed by a mostly pliant media. Perhaps it’s scarcely surprising that states which have themselves invaded and occupied a string of Arab and Muslim countries in the past decade should take the side of another occupier they fund and arm to the hilt.

But the idea that Israel is responding to a hail of rockets out of a clear blue sky takes “narrative framing” beyond the realm of fantasy. In fact, after the deal that ended Israel’s last assault on Gaza in 2012, rocketing from Gaza fell to its lowest level for 12 years.

The latest violence is supposed to have been triggered by the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank in June, for which Hamas denied responsibility. But its origin clearly lies in the collapse of US-sponsored negotiations for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the spring.

Complete story at - Gaza: this shameful injustice will only end if the cost of it rises | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian

Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

by Chris Floyd

The horror of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself — despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the “Warsaw Ghetto” they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel’s weaponry (much of it American-made).

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels.

This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media — and Western politicians — are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel “under siege” from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.

But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind — unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington’s own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions — against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a “threat” to you — whether they are or not. The ‘stand your ground’ laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true — the only — meaning of “American exceptionalism”: the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.

Complete story at - Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

by Chris Floyd

The horror of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself — despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the “Warsaw Ghetto” they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel’s weaponry (much of it American-made).

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels.

This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media — and Western politicians — are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel “under siege” from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.

But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind — unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington’s own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions — against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a “threat” to you — whether they are or not. The ‘stand your ground’ laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true — the only — meaning of “American exceptionalism”: the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.

Complete story at - Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto | The Smirking Chimp

On Israel, Ukraine and Truth » CounterPunch:

by John Pilger

The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.

In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”.

At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirises the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule”, the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war?

The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.

Complete story at - On Israel, Ukraine and Truth » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The New York Times Criticized for Submitting to Israeli Censors | Informed Comment

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The New York Times Criticized for Submitting to Israeli Censors | Informed Comment

(By Sarah Lazare)

The New York Times made a rare admission that it submits to Israeli state gag orders, fueling charges from critics that the globally-influential publication plays fast-and-loose with journalistic ethics to give favorable coverage to Israel.

The revelation emerged when the The Times delayed its coverage of the Israeli detention of a Palestinian journalist, due—as it turns out—to a gag order from an Israeli court.

The blackout came to light when journalists who did not heed the gag order exposed the detention and media censorship. The Times's public editor, Margaret Sullivan, then elicited an admission from her own publication that it complies with Israeli media blackouts as a matter of policy.

Gagging Coverage of Journalist's Detention

Journalist and activist Majd Kayyal, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was returning from a conference in Lebanon on Saturday when Israeli Shin Bet secret police detained him for five days, during which he was interrogated and denied access to a lawyer.

Complete story at - The New York Times Criticized for Submitting to Israeli Censors | Informed Comment